Catching Up with Noah Shanok '93

From struggling student to successful startup mentor
In 2007, when Noah Shanok ’93 created the podcast app Stitcher, he was way ahead of the curve. “The company foresaw the power and potential of mobile internet when a Blackberry was the closest thing to a smartphone, and made a huge bet on it,” Paul Riismandel wrote in a 2015 Midroll article. “That kind of foresight led Stitcher also to see automotive connectivity on the horizon.”

Noah told Riismandel in 2015, “[W]hen the iPhone launched, we were very early to the App Store… and that’s when we started to see the early success.” Today, Stitcher is integrated into over 50 car models and is one of the most popular ways to listen to podcasts. Time magazine listed it first in its 2018 list of “The 5 Best Podcast Apps for Android and iPhone.”

Noah sold Stitcher in 2014, but that was not the end of his journey as an innovator and an entrepreneur. He now works in startup business development for Amazon Web Services, serving as a mentor to other entrepreneurs and founders alongside a team of other former CEOs of venture-backed companies. Noah spoke about how he has achieved success in work and in life, and what he learned at VA that set him on that path.

Noah’s Vermont Academy Experience

Noah Shanok was not thriving at his New York City high school, to say the least. “Penny Riegelman, Peter’s sister, was the dean at my New York City day school, which, at the time, I was in the process of getting kicked out of,” Noah said. “I didn’t like New York, never went to class, and somehow managed to skirt by with a D in every one of my classes (which, Penny told my parents, showed some type of brilliance).”

Penny knew that Noah had a passion for skiing, sparked after a family friend took him to the slopes as a bar mitzvah present. “I completely fell in love with skiing,” Noah said, “and I started getting interested in boarding schools in that context—I wanted to ski, and I needed to have more community and be out of the city.”

Penny said that she would put in a good word with her brother Peter if Noah would swear that he would not get kicked out of Vermont Academy. “I swore,” said Noah, “and I took that very seriously. When I showed up to Vermont Academy, I felt like this was my chance to do things on my own.”

When Noah arrived at VA, he didn’t know how to study. “I was street smart,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure if I was smart.” Required study hall sessions helped, and by his second term, Noah was added to John Bohannon’s honors history class. “That gave me a lot of confidence,” Noah said. “It just felt like there was really a village. There were a lot of teachers who were also your dorm parents and your advisors, and who were looking out for you.”

John Bohannon, now retired from Vermont Academy, said recently of Noah, “He was a congenial, assertive, inquisitive student who got along well with his peers. I have fond memories of teaching him.”

Noah connected with one teacher in particular: Shamus Daly. “I still call him every year on his birthday,” he said, “and it’s been 25 years since he was my teacher. I just talked to him two weeks ago.”

Laura Frey, currently the chair of our World Language department, was in College Counseling at the time and helped Noah find the college that would be the best fit for him. “Noah was a kid who was perfect for Vermont Academy and Vermont Academy for him,” Laura said. “He was bright and adventurous and needed a safe place to grow up and into himself. The time I spent with Noah in the College Counseling office gave me the chance to observe his constant energy, innate intelligence, and an unusually calm management of his considerable ambition.”

Noah stuck with his favorite winter sport while at VA, despite some challenges.“I tried so hard at skiing,” he said, “and I started so much later than my classmates. During my senior year, every week they would put up the board of who was on the varsity squad. I finally made it in the last position. I stood in front of the lineup list and just stared at it in amazement and pride.”

Bob Long was the head of school at the time and made a big impression on Noah. “Bob Long was really incredible and taught me a lot about leadership,” Noah said. “While my style is very different, I think I was a better CEO because of my experience with him.”

Senior Year Hijinks

Bob Long’s leadership is not the only thing Noah remembers fondly about the headmaster:

“We had this tradition that the seniors would sneak out at night a couple of weeks before graduation,” Noah said. “My friend Carson Simmons ’93 and I decided that we’d paint a big ‘93’ on the ski jump.

“The scary thing about sneaking out at night was Bob Long. He’d be out there, dressed all in black, hunting students. There were these Rambo-like stories of him just materializing out of the shadows and tackling students. Keep in mind, too, he was around 5’ 6”, 160 lbs, and over 50 yrs old. Yet he commanded so much respect from us that the thought was pretty terrifying.

“So Carson and I were up there at about 3 a.m., and we’d finished the ‘9’ and were about to start the ‘3.’ As luck would have it, out of the shadows, Bob Long materialized and saw us. Carson, who was a remarkable athlete, pulled some kind of ninja move and peaced out. And the next thing I know, Bob Long is chasing me hard. He chased me through to the far end of the upper field, and I jumped in this swamp and didn’t hear him anymore. So, feeling proud of myself, I snuck back along the road and he got me. He was just waiting. And he was bone dry.

“Well, the ski jump looked pretty silly with a ‘9’ painted on it all by itself. And I really wanted to finish it, but I couldn’t get caught again or I’d get kicked out. And Carson was too smart to risk it again after seeing what happened to me. So we went to Bob Long’s office and explained our predicament. He chuckled and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, you may have better luck tomorrow morning between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m.” And so Carson and I finished what we started.”

Bob Long stepped down in 1993, the year Noah graduated. Noah was selected by his class to deliver their thank-you speech and gift to Mr. Long. “That was one of the proudest moments of my life,” Noah said. “I think Vermont Academy gave me structure, which was something I was missing,” he continued, “and structure is very important and underappreciated in the entrepreneurial world. It was also a safe place for me to take risks and push my boundaries, and to feel like it was okay because people had my back. It was a very important period of time for me as it related to what I ended up doing.”

The Path After VA

Noah knew that he wanted to remain in the Northeast and attend a small liberal arts college after leaving VA. He went to Skidmore College, where he studied business. “I was always pretty entrepreneurial and knew that I wanted to start companies,” he said.

After graduating from Skidmore, he decided to take the advice of a teacher and spend a few years on Wall Street learning finance. Never one to make the dull choice, Noah took the signing bonus that was intended to be used for a new wardrobe of business suits, and instead bought a motorcycle and spent the summer camping all over the United States and Canada by himself. Seeing the country on his own, he said, “was a pretty impactful experience.”

As a young bond trader, Noah was successful, but he found the work “pretty soulless.” After his second-year bonus, he resigned and once again traveled the U.S., looking for a community that was as passionate about business startups as he was. He landed in San Francisco and was approached by some Stanford Business School graduates about starting a new kind of ticket company. That company turned out to be StubHub, now one of the largest ticketing platforms in the world, and Noah was its fifth employee. “I worked there a couple of years,” he said, “and that solidified for me how much I love startups and how much I love building things.”

Noah recognized that two of StubHub’s founders were his age but had high-level business degrees—one from Harvard University and the other from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania—that had helped to open doors for them. This inspired him to pursue an M.B.A. of his own.

“Miraculously, I got into Wharton, and I spent my time working on business plans,” he said. “Vermont Academy helped to give me the toolkit to get the grades, even though I don’t work too well academically.”

When he graduated from Wharton, he was the only one of his classmates who didn’t have a job. True to form, he created his own. First he worked in management consulting for a short time, and then he started a podcast “for fun.”

“I hired a comedian,” he said, “and we were doing this podcast out of my house—like America’s Funniest Home Videos, but for audio. Angry ex-boyfriend voicemails, great maid of honor speeches, things like that. I recognized a much bigger opportunity and shift in the way that radio or audio was being consumed. I was an early adopter of streaming music services and thought there should be a similar thing for talk.”

This led him to create Stitcher. It began as an iTunes plug-in, then became a web platform, and finally a mobile app. Noah ran the company for seven years, raising about $30 million from investors and growing Stitcher’s user base to several million.

After he sold Stitcher in 2014, “I basically slept for a year,” he said. “I was exhausted. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and I found helping other entrepreneurs to be the most meaningful to me. That brought me to my current job at Amazon Web Services.”

Noah lives in San Francisco, rides his mountain bike frequently in Marin and Tahoe, and skis in Tahoe as often as he can, continuing the love of the sport that first brought him to Vermont Academy. “I love being outside in beautiful places,” he said, “and I love the speed and challenge of skiing. I started mountain biking for the same reasons.”

Noah added, “I would like to thank my Grandma Dorothy, who paid for my education. And appreciated that I was a little meshugah (Yiddish for crazy). Vermont Academy is so meaningful to me. My memories of the people—my teachers and my friends—really shine. It always felt like it was a community. I felt protected, and everybody knew who I was, and people were loving and caring. That really helped me to grow as a person.”

Sources

“Stitcher Founder Noah Shanok Foresaw the Power of Mobile Internet.” Paul Riismandel, Jan. 8, 2015. www.midroll.com/stitcher-founder-noah- shanok-mobile-internet/

“The 5 Best Podcast Apps for Android and iPhone.” Lisa Eadicicco, Feb. 20, 2018. time.com/5136033/best-podcast- apps-android-ios/
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Vermont Academy is a coed college preparatory boarding and day school in southern Vermont, serving grades 9-12 plus a postgraduate year.